On Friday 01 May 2009, Aldo Foot wrote: >On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Les <hlhowell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> G is right on all counts. ... >> That said, if you start with a few beginner articles, >> and please do the exercises they have, you will learn. The exercises >> are important to lock the information with the potential errors that you >> will encounter, and the effort needed to correct them. > >The problem is that today, just about anyone publishes a book about >anything and they become repetitive or just rewords of another title. >Finding good beginner's material is not easy. If I had the time, I'd go >to some community college to take a class or two. > As another genuine old fart, I'll heartily second that. And to an extent, I'll blame the legal morass our copyright laws are in today. Simply put, no one can write a beginners manual in modern language without running afoul of some copyrights that could even belong to the Harold Ennis Estate. We have well and truly shot ourselves a bit higher than the foot with this stuff. >> Like G, I started a long time ago, from vacuum tubes, and while the >> circuits have changed, the elements of design and software have not. >> Almost everything I ever learned has benefited me. So did I, I was born in 34, and by VJ day in '45 was playing with vacuum tubes, and by '51 I was fixing all the tv's the dealers couldn't fix in Iowa and the north half of Missouri for a living. At the A.A. Schneiderhahn Co. in Des Moines IA., for an after taxes check of $77 every two weeks. But inflation soon made that less than appetizing so just short of a year I was looking for more money, faster horses, older whiskey & younger women. But the song hadn't been written yet! >Man... you guys actually saw the birth of computers. It's like having been >present at moment of the Big Bang. >I can only imagine you blowing up light bulbs in the garage. :-) Yup, it was fun then, but our knowledge base then was something one could comprehend with diligence, now, particularly if ones interests are 'eclectic', there is no way in hell you can be a generalist, although I have to admit I try. That knowledge base is now about 100,000 times the size it was in 1950. Or even more than that, I've not seen any recent figures. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Some of my readers ask me what a "Serial Port" is. The answer is: I don't know. Is it some kind of wine you have with breakfast? -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
